Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [19]
It’s water, Robin Goodman says.
No, I say. I mean, what’s the correct word for it, I mean, for you? I need to know it. I need to know the proper word.
She looks at me for a long time. I can feel her looking right through my drunkness. Then, when she speaks, it is as if the whole look of her speaks.
The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
us
Because of us, things came together. Everything was possible.
I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.
Now I’d become a walking fuse, like in that poem about the flower, and the force, and the green fuse the force drives through it; the force that blasts the roots of trees was blasting the roots of me, I was like a species that hadn’t even realised it lived in a near-desert till one day its taproot hit water. Now I had taken a whole new shape. No, I had taken the shape I was always supposed to, the shape that let me hold my head high. Me, Anthea Gunn, head turned towards the sun.
Your name, Robin had said on our first underwater night together deep in each other’s arms. It means flowers, did you know that?
No it doesn’t, I’d said. Gunn means war. The clan motto is Either Peace or War. Midge and I did a clan project at school when I was small.
No, I mean your first name, she said.
I was named after someone off the tv, I said.
It means flowers, or a coming-up of flowers, a blooming of flowers, she said. I looked you up.
She was behind me in the bed, she was speaking into my shoulder.
You, she was saying. You’re a walking peace protest. You’re the flower in the Gunn.
And what about you? I said. I tried looking you up too. I did it before we’d even met. What does the weird name mean?
What weird name? she said.
It isn’t in the dictionary, I said. I looked. I Googled you. It doesn’t mean anything.
Everything means something, she said.
Iphisol, I said.
Iff is sol? she said. Iffisol? I don’t know. I’ve no idea. It sounds like aerosol. Or Anusol.
She was holding me loosely, her arms were round me and one leg over my legs keeping me warm, I could feel the smooth new skin of her from my shoulders down to my calves. Then the bed was shaking; she was laughing.
Not Iffisol. Eye fizz ol, she said. Iphis is said like eye fizz. And it’s not ol, it’s 07. Like, the name, Iphis, but with the year, the oh and the seven of two thousand and seven.
Oh. Iphis oh seven. Oh, I said.
I was laughing now too. I turned in her arms and put my head on her laughing collarbone.
Like double oh seven. Daniel Craig in Casino Royal, rising out of the water like that goddess on a shell, I said. Lo and behold.
Ursula Andress did it first, she said. I mean, after Venus herself, that is. In fact, Daniel Craig and Ursula Andress look remarkably alike, when you compare them. No, because last year I used Iphis06. The year before I was Iphis05. God knows what you’d have thought they said. Iffisog. Iffisos.
It had been exciting, first the not knowing what Robin was, then the finding out. The grey area, I’d discovered, had been misnamed: really the grey area was a whole other spectrum of colours new to the eye. She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys’ heads like a girl. She turned girls’ heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree. I had simply never found anyone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak. Sometimes when I looked at her, I had to look away. Already she was like no one else to me. Already I was